An Address to the Electors of Oxford

By EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

ERY laughable, this little affair they're V having up in Oxford. The election to the Professorship of Poetry, I mean. What?—You haven't heard of it? Why, only last Sunday Atticus of the Sunday Times gave a couple of hundred words to the subject (most of them, I admit, were devoted to Dr. Enid Starkie, who isn't a candidate, only a candidate's manager). It's true that Atticus feels that it doesn't matter who gets in. 'There's no power, little work, and less money,' he says loftily. I seem to hear the voice of the Acquisitive Society. And, what's more, he's wrong. It does matter who gets in— it matters to quite a lot of people. Besides being the home of lost causes, Oxford is a shelter for thin skins and high IQs. The election of a new Professor of Poetry offers a splendid opportun- ity for paying off old scores—but obliquely, and in a thoroughly civilised way. One might even call it a necessary safety valve for aca- demic passions. The candidates, who nowadays tend to come from outside the university, are merely convenient stalking horses.

Nevertheless, the Professorship of Poetry is one of the very few official posts connected with the art. Here in England we have the Laureateship, the Gregory Fellowship in Leeds, and this, which unlike the other two is elective. And the candidates, on the present occasion, play oddly symbolic roles. In fact, they sum up between them the present state of English poetry. On my right, there stands Edmund Blunden, war-poet, sometime Fellow of Merton, and former Professor of English at Hong Kong University. On my left is Robert Lowell, rebel- lious Roman Catholic scion of the famous Boston Lowells, and the best-known practitioner of 'confessional' verse. Each is a fine writer, but they, stand at a wide angle to each other.

To explain why this is so, one has to go back a step. It's little realised in England how im- mensely conservative a period English verse has been going through. Despite a recent wave of American influence (spearheaded by Lowell's own work) the poetry written in this country is little different, either technically or from the point of view of subject-matter, from what was being written before the First World War. One of Mr. Blunden's supporters rather rashly claimed, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, that Blunden had been 'a major in- fluence on young modern poets like Ted Hughes.' One has only to check up to find that the case doesn't hold water. The major influence on Hughes's poetry—almost the only influence that I can discover—has been D. H. Lawrence. But one can put Blunden's work into a post- 1945 context and see how easily it fits. He is not so far from Larkin, from Betjeman, from David Holbrook. Partly, indeed, one can put this down to the dominance which Larkin exer- cised over the verse of the 'fifties. For all its subtlety, Larkin's is a defensive talent. His

poems are a dike built against the floodwaters of barbarism—a barbarism more insidious, perhaps, than that which Blunden felt he had only half- escaped after the peace of 1918: Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day, I sit in solitude and only hear Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay, The lost intensities of hope and fear; In those old marshes yet the rifles lie, On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags, The very books I read are there—and I Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags Its wounded length from those sad streets of war Into sad places here, that were mine own . . .

('1916 Seen from 1921')

I quote these lines for two reasons. One is that they catch exactly that tone of numbness which is also to be found in much British verse of the past twenty years. The other is that they illus- trate the rather academic nature of Blunden's technique. The thing, in fact, that has held him back from being more than a minor poet.

Only in England has poetry clung so firmly to the academic, to the use of 'received' language, and 'received' forms. This refusal eventually left the road open for the Americans. It's arguable that the appearance of Robert Lowell's book Life Studies in 1959 was easily the most significant thing to have happened in English poetry for the past decade, and this in spite of the fact that it had little to do with what was being written over here. The effect was seismic. Reviewers fumbled—they didn't know how to tackle the book, it was outside their experience, though they had praised the earlier Selected Poems. The poets were wildly excited. Some- where in the correspondence columns of the SPECTATOR for that year is a joint letter from Peter' Porter and myself angrily denouncing the treatment it got in these pages—and this was only one very small sign among many. Lowell instantly achieved an influence over English poetry perhaps greater than any which he exer- cised in his own country. American critics recognise Lowell's stature, but are puzzled to find how much he has meant, and still means, in England.

As a poet, Lowell is an extraordinary mixture: an aristocrat and a man of learning who also possesses a peculiarly American spontaneity and nakedness: One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull.

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull.

where the graveyard shelves on the town My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats, 'Love, 0 careless Love . . . ' I hear jay ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat,

nobody's here—

('Skunk Hour')

These two verses, from one of the best-known poems in Life Studies, will help to explain why Lowell had such an impact. The content is

alarming, the attitude thoroughly modern. But they are beautifully designed—supple, subtle and musical, with never a wasted word. No one has written better in the past twenty years, on either side of the Atlantic.

The history of Lowell's subsequent influence has been a strange one. No English poet, for example, has been able to produce good 'con- fessional' verse in the American style. All the same, there has been a loosening of the bonds; a reconciliation between poetry and the other arts, such as painting and music, which have been more continuously and directly concerned with the idea of experiment. It's not too much to say that Lowell made 'modernism' accessible again, and saved English poetry from death by stagnation. These are great services, and it would be a fine gesture to acknowledge them by making Lowell the first American-born Pro- fessor of Poetry (Auden, of course, was an American citizen when he held the office). Auden, Graves and Lowell would make a succession of which any university might be proud—even Oxford. Academic passions can be satisfied by creating a new Professorship of Parish Pumps, and holding a contest for that.